2018 Goals for PennyHarmony – Money, Health, and Home

We here at PennyHarmony are all about setting goals and reaching them so with the New Year we thought it would be the best time to start thinking about some of our short term goals.

Picture it, it’s 11:30 pm on December 31, 2017 and Landon looks over at me and says,

So you want to make some resolutions for the next year?

Really babe, with only 30 minutes left we want to discuss resolutions?

Of course there was no judgement, I didn’t have any plan to discuss resolutions at all; I was just looking forward to toasting midnight so I could go to bed. Instead we worked quickly while the countdown continued for the next 30 minutes.

Together we created this list of our goals for the next calendar year and we are thrilled about achieving all of them in the coming months. Hopefully, this post will inspire some of you to create your own yearly goals, to make your goals “SMART” (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time sensitive), and to follow through. Keep in mind, your goals are workable; no one knows what the next year is going to bring to any of us.

We broke our goals into three different categories: health, money, and home.

Health Goals

These goals really focus on improving ourselves and improving our lives in the new year. We also highly value our travel time and have included our vacation plans into this goal, because for us travel is a priority and instrumental to our mental health. We travel hard because we work hard. So here our health goals for all the world to see:

Run two 5k’s I know, I know, I can hear collective groans as I type. Yes, we are joggers and we want to complete two 5k’s this year and we both want to improve our mile times. My mile time is abysmal (at over 13 minutes per mile, I’m basically walking) while my husbands is something to talk about. However, his mile time was from approximately 8 years ago with little training in the last 5 years. My mile time is from a 5k I ran in October of 2017, so it’s more current.

Go floating at least ten times Hey, being healthy isn’t all about your body. You have to focus on what makes your heart happy and your head clear. So what is floating you might ask? Floating around here means kayaking or canoeing down a local stream. Yes, we could call it canoeing or kayaking, but floating is a whole different thing. It’s relaxing and rowdy and physical and peaceful. Floating is more about bonding with your friends, enjoying the beauty of our streams/rivers, stopping at the gravel bars to skip some stones, and going at a leisurely pace. In 2017 we went on one float trip, despite owning our own kayaks and a pick-up that we can easily load the kayaks into. This year, we are going to make it a priority to get out there more often, even if it’s just the two of us.

Camp at least one time Usually floating and camping go hand in hand, but we didn’t do any camping last year. That is a real bummer.

We have three planned vacations coming up in the following year and are super excited about them. I highly recommend vacation planning at the beginning of the year along with goal setting. Taking a vacation can be one of the most anticipated events all year and prioritizing your vacations is a must.

Vacation 1: Last year my husband surprised me with a six-month anniversary trip in the middle of January to Hermann, MO. Hermann is a small town roughly 2 hours from us that has an historic downtown based on German immigrants and eight different wineries. In 2018, we are going for a weekend in February. One great tradition we started last year was while we are on this romantic weekend away in a quaint B&B, we cannot use electronics! During our weekend we have no TV, no phones (except to listen to music), and no GPS.

Vacation 2: Some of our closest friends are getting married in Illinois in April of this year. In 2017 a group of our ten closest friends took a trip to Manhattan Beach, CA for a destination wedding. Well we had so much fun that this year we are doing it all over again with the same group, just a different bride and groom. We are so excited! This vacation will likely be a 5 day trip.

Vacation 3: This is our big vacation we have planned and it will be right around the time of our two-year wedding anniversary. We are planning on going to the Bar Harbor, Maine area. This vacation will be sometime in July when the weather in Missouri averages in the 90’s and the humidity is in the 80% range. Not only are we going to stay in Bar Harbor and see what the town has to offer, but we are going to catch a cruise on a Windjammer, an historic wooden ship.

What goals are you setting to improve your health? We all know January is the time to start, so what’s in store for you in the next year?

Home Goals

Ok, so as you all know from our older posts, we are fixing up our 1973 home all. the. time. Our ultimate goal is to rent the house out, but why not make it our own while we are still living in it? Here is what we plan to accomplish for the home this year.

Remodel our living room We have two living spaces, one at the front of the house and one at the back. We plan on painting, replacing all trim, and adding a chair rail with recessive wainscoting in our front living room. We have the colors finally picked out; both are from Magnolia Home. Trust me when I say, these colors are gorgeous and our house desperately needs updating. If you would like a post detailing the process, let me know in the comments below.

Finish laying drain tile under the house This is all up to my husband, as it was huge undertaking he took on when we first moved in. It has been almost four years, so it’s officially time to finish this one up.

Remodel the guest room Our guest room, like our front living room, needs some updating like, 10 years ago. I have the perfect color picked out and we plan on doing this room after we do the front living room.

Spring Cleaning Although we clean and tackle big cleaning projects periodically, this clean is going to make all others pale in comparison. We are re-organizing, going through our closets, maybe even having a yard sale. In short, we are simplifying, then cleaning the hell out of our house this spring. I fully believe it will take an entire weekend, with many hours of planning up to this point. My husband has even said he will be cleaning the garage, I cannot wait to see how we do.

Money Goals Finally, money goals are my favorite to make and to achieve. This year my husband really came on board with my infatuation with money, as he himself decided he wanted more out of life than working to pay bills. We are now a team working our butts off to make our homesteading life beyond our 9-5’s a reality. Here’s what we’ve come up with for 2018:

Pay off my husbands student loans The only debt we have besides our mortgage is our student debt. We already paid off my smallest loan (woot woot!) so we stepped up to our next smallest loan and started paying off my husbands $8,000 student debt. We started this in October, so we have already paid off almost half. With some help from MINT, we anticipate paying off this loan by April of 2018. Then we can start chipping away at the remainder of my student debt! We cannot wait to have these payments behind us, like so many people our age.

Grow our savings account to $20,000 Maybe you see this goal and think, “alright moneybags, I’m just trying to live paycheck to paycheck”, or maybe you think “you don’t have that much in your savings? how do you even sleep at night?” Well, that goal is the beginning step to saving for the down payment for our next home. We want to be debt-free, ASAP. And one way to do that is to put more down on your house.

So that’s it for our goals for 2018. What do you plan to do with the coming 12 months and how do you plan to accomplish it? Leave me a comment below and let me know how great 2018 will be for you.